Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, controlling method, printing apparatus, and storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In a conventional printing industry, an offset reproduction printing press has been used in printing processing, so the block copy preparation process is indispensable. However, once the block copy is prepared, it is difficult to correct the block copy, and correcting the block copy raises the cost. Hence, the block copy preparation requires careful proofreading (i.e., careful layout check and color confirmation), and it takes time to issue publications.
In this situation, POD (Print On Demand) printing systems using electrophotographic and inkjet printing apparatuses have been proposed recently (see patent references 1 and 2).
The POD printing system can omit the block copy preparation and other cumbersome work processes.
[Patent Reference 1]
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-310746
[Patent Reference 2]
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-310747
However, there is room for further study in commercializing the POD printing system.
Assume that the printing company or the like uses the POD printing system. In this printing environment, it is important to efficiently create customer-satisfactory print materials as many as possible in a short period.
In this printing environment, it is expected that the operator at the printing site needs to check whether the printing system outputs print materials which satisfy the customer. It is also expected that the printing system needs to continuously operate without unnecessarily stopping the print operation of the printing system.
Considering these requirements, there will be a need to check print materials in the above-described way without unnecessarily stopping the print operation of the printing system. In the future, the following need will arise. That is, the operator wants a print unit to perform printing automatically by a print checking function on condition that a job to be printed satisfies a condition to cause the print unit to perform printing automatically using the checking print function available to check printing results and/or change printing conditions. However, a mechanism which meets this need has not been proposed at present.